Introduction and Initial thoughts (Chapters 1-5)

Hello, and welcome to my blog!

Over the next few weeks, I will be reading Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson and sharing my thoughts with you all. So far I have made it through the first four chapters of the book. From what I thought was going to be a dry, fact-filled book about the broken American criminal justice system surprisingly turned out to be a very intriguing one. From the very first page, I knew I chose the right book as I was immediately drawn in.

Introduction

Brian Stevenson educates his readers about unfairness in the justice system by telling stories. It is interesting that he chooses to do this. He must have taken into consideration that sometimes facts don't really settle in when they are told raw. I don't know about you all, but for me, when I am reading pages after pages of bland research and facts, I begin to lose interest quickly and start to think about random things in my life until all of a sudden I have read 20 pages and I haven't even processed what was on those pages. I have to really focus when reading those types of non-fiction books. This is not the case for Just Mercy as I have not yet been bored off!

I feel that sometimes the best way for people to really understand a situation is through a story. Through stories, we can easily allow ourselves to put ourselves in the character's shoes and see the situation from many different viewpoints. Stories can bring out emotions in readers and when things are told through ways of a story it is more likely to make an impact.

What makes this book so effective for me is the fact that these stories are real. It makes his argument about the unfair criminal justice system clear and easily comprehensible. From the beginning, you can see that Stevenson values his readers and he wants to make sure that he really connects with them. He does this by starting off his book by telling a story about himself and how he became a lawyer. He didn't expect to become a lawyer, let alone be working with inmates on death row. He started off in college as a philosophy major. Yet during his fourth year, he realized that he wouldn't make much of a living as a philosopher and therefor it wasn't what he wanted to pursue anymore. He had to think of a new plan, and ended up at Harvard Law School. He didn't exactly known where he was headed but he had his desire to help the poor and fight against inequality, so he decided to try law school.

In the very first paragraph, Stevenson mentions his first internship in Georgia and how it changed his life. He had never been inside of a maximum-security prison and therefore never been anywhere near death row. Yet his first internship, he was assigned to work with a man on death row. Stevenson shows no shame in allowing his readers to see how uncomfortable he felt in that situation. However, we soon find out that meeting this inmate, Henry, and attempting to help him with his struggles changed Stevenson's point of view and empowered him with a new desire to become a lawyer and join the fight in attempting to make the justice system fair. It is important that Stevenson includes this part in his novel as he is able to establish his position in all of these stories as well as his credibility as a lawyer.

Walter McMillian

In chapter one, Stevenson introduces us to the story of Walter McMillian. Walter’s story seems to be a big one that is going to take many chapters or maybe the whole book to tell. Walter McMillian is a black man who grew up on the outskirts of Monroeville, Alabama. He is an innocent man who once established and owned a pulpwood business. He then met a married white woman, Karen Kelley. The two fell in love. The only problem was that during that time, interracial relationships were not acceptable. The news soon broke loose and Walter became known as the black man who had sexual relations with a white woman. Karen struggled with consequences of her own as well, being the white woman, married, who had fallen in love with a black man, something highly frowned upon. She starts to fall downhill and becomes involved with drugs, through which she met Ralph Myers, a white man. He had a nasty criminal background and at the time was already suspected for murder when the murder of Ronda Morrison, a white girl from a well-to-do and well-known family was killed at the local cleaners. He was immediately taken into questioning for this murder, and this is when Myers began his exaggerated stories of what had happened. Every time he was asked, he would come up with a new story.

It was clear that he was lying, and even more clear when he claimed that one of the sheriffs themselves had murdered Ronda. One day, Myers decides to say that Walter McMillian was involved. Suddenly everyone decided to believe this clearly not-competent man. So it was decided that Ralph Myer’s newest lie was the truth: Walter McMillian, who was actually at home that day disassembling his truck, forced Myers into his car and made him drive to the cleaners, where McMillian went into the store, murdered Ronda, and then forced Myers to drive him back to the gas station where he let Myers go and promptly drove off.

"But there was no evidence against McMillian. No evidence except that he was an African American man involved in adulterous interracial affair, which meant he was reckless and possibly dangerous, even if he had no prior criminal history and a good reputation." (p. 34)

I just find it so shocking how terrible people and their actions can be. Walter was convicted of a crime that he had absolutely nothing to do with. He was put on death row when he had done absolutely nothing. Surely many people knew this, but since he was a black man, and his name was already well know for his involvement with a white woman, they did not care. They should have cared. There is a murderer on the loose and an innocent man in his place. How can people let this happen? How can people be okay with letting this happen?

Herbert Richardson

Brian Stevenson wants to make it clear early on in his novel that this is not the only time that unjust trials have happened. He shows us how people are sentenced all the time to the death penalty for crimes that such a sentence should not be fit for:

In this section, we learn the stories of Stevenson’s clients Horace Dunkins, Micheal Lindsay, and Herbert Richardson. The one that really stood out to me was Herbert Richardson’s. He was a Vietnam War veteran, and his experiences there left him severely traumatized. On one of his missions, his platoon was ambushed and he was the only survivor. He had to watch his friends die every day. He eventually returned to New York City and tried to recover at a veteran’s hospital. There, he met a nurse, to whom he formed an attachment to and became mildly obsessed with, increasingly so as time went on. She moved to Alabama, and so Herbert followed. One day he came up with a plan: to prove his ability of protection by making a bomb, placing it on her porch, and bravely running to save her when it exploded. Unfortunately, his plan backfired when the nurse’s 10-year-old niece saw the bomb (it looked like a box), picked it up, and shook it. It blew up and she was killed in a flash. Herbert was arrested as they found the parts to make a bomb in his car and put on death row. But was this the right decision, considering his past? He was still recovering from the horrific trauma he experienced in Vietnam, as well as the fact that his mother died when he was three and he was an addict before he enlisted in the war.

Using the stories of his clients as real-life examples not only pulls us in to be emotionally connected but also opens up our minds to the American criminal justice system and how unfair it has been for so many years. I found that with each new client's story Stevenson described, the more angry and frustrated I became towards the criminal justice system. Herbert's story, followed all the way up to the end, affected me the most. When I was reading I was secretly hoping that something could be done to save Herbert from being executed. This was Stevenson's third client on death row that he had to fight for, his third story, and from the length of time that he spent following this story in the book I expected there to be a better outcome. Yet sadly I learned that despite his hard work and Herbert's never ending hope, the Supreme Court denied the request to cancel Herbert's execution date...

Is the Death Penalty fair?

At the end of chapter four Stevenson brings up the common claim that people use for the death penalty in debates: paying someone to rape, assault, or abuse people convicted of rape, assault or abuse is not the same as paying someone to kill a man who killed someone because it requires too much thinking and details. Killing someone, people argue, is quick and easy and does not require much thought.

However, this book shows that intentionally killing someone is not in any means easy.

"I thought about the visitation officer, the Department of Corrections officials, the men who were paid to shave Herbert's body so that he could be killed more efficiently. I thought about the officers who had strapped him into the chair. I kept thinking that no one could actually believe that this was a good thing to do or even a necessary thing to do." (p. 90)

Herbert Richardson's execution was set for 12:01 AM on August 18th. It was carefully planned out. He was allowed to spend time with his family until 10:00 PM when the guards came to take him back and begin preparing him for his execution. They needed to strip him of his clothes, shave all of his hair away so that the electrodes would properly deliver the electricity, and situate him in the chair. All of that sounds like a lot of thinking and preparation to me. Think about all the work that went into
making that electrocution chair.

Before reading this book I never really took the time to think about how criminals have lives, they have history and reasons for their actions or maybe they don’t have any reasons at all because they were wrongly convicted or they were suffering from mental illness. I never really thought twice about the fact that people convicted of crimes may not be guilty or may not necessarily deserve the sentences that they receive. I, myself, think that I am guilty of judging a book by its cover. I see the news headlines, see a mugshot, hear the “story” told in the words of the local news station, and think: he/she’s a criminal. Yet I shouldn’t be doing this because I don’t know the whole story behind their actions. Maybe they have not been able to seek the right treatment for their mental health issues and that is what caused them to do what they did. If that’s the case, what they did isn’t entirely on them. They may not deserve the sentence that they were given. It is very concerning to see how lawyers and jurors and judges are jumping to conclusions and not taking the time to dig into the case or pay attention and learn more about the defendant. You’d think that after years of schooling, or if you were in the courtroom, you would learn to put bias and personal opinions aside.


Thanks for reading!

WORKS CITED:

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy. Spiegel & Grau, 2014.